5 Tested tools to write better content

I came to Canada in 2015 and since then I am learning a lot about this amazing country. And it was a shock when I found out there are no Grammar lessons on school, they learn grammar by writing and reading. This explains a lot why there are so many mistakes in the comment section of social media. I know my English is not the best, I learned English when I was a teenager, I studied for 7 years, then I stopped. I thought it was enough. Then 10 years later, I had to study for the IELTS and wow! I was in trouble. I studied using a book named Ace the IELTS and it helped me a lot. In the end, I got a 7.0 in 9.0, so not that bad. No class prepared me to speak in a foreign country, the first week I thought I would never going to make it. Every sentence I heard took me at least 3 seconds to process, as a loading time and more than often I inserted a word in Portuguese in the middle. I always thought people might think I was stupid or something, then I met this Russian guy who told me to not worry, it was just a sound. Even if speaking in English is not my forte, my writing skills were good enough and I made my way through it. I still confuse in and on and the phrasal verbs kill me every time.

You don't need to write perfectly to write blog posts.

Most people don’t even think about this

I love to read and the more I read in English, the more I learn to write and speak. This is probably not your reality, you probably were born in an English country but maybe you feel that your writing skills are not good enough to write good content. Don’t worry, there are good manuals around and everybody writes. And that’s the name of the book I recommend.

If you have a website, you are a publisher. If you are on social media, you are in marketing. And that means we are all writers.

I can’t stress enough how this book is important to me. I have a shelf on the top of my desk and this book is there and I often get it to consult. Ann Handley does such a great work with this book. It’s divided into 6 parts, and the way she writes makes everything so light.

Part 1: Writing rules: How to write better (and how to hating writing less)

Part 2: Writing rules: Grammar and usage

Part 3: Story Rules

Part 4: Publishing Rules

Part 5: 13 things marketers write

Part 6: Content tools

Here is the list of online tools that I tested. I love how all of them help me write better content.

Pro Writing Aid Editing Tool // A free tool that finds all the mistakes on your text and gives you solutions on style, repetitions, overused, readability, cliches, echoes, sentence length. There is a premium account that gives you a Chrome extension, it edits where you write (good for mac and windows users) and there is no word count. It’s only $50 a year and I think it’s a steal.

Weava // It has a weird name but I don’t know how I lived my life as a blogger without this. It’s a Chrome extension where you can highlight your researches in the color of your preference. It saves and organize by color in one place.

Keywords Everywhere // Another amazing extension that shows all the keywords used for any topic you search on Google, how many times is used, the related keywords and other things people searched for. Best part: Free and unlimited!

Trello // You can write your blog post direct on WordPress, I am doing this right now. But before this I use Trello to decide things like the title, put a checklist of everything I need, the links, the images. It’s my organization tool. Trello is free forever, you can make unlimited boards and cards, and also collaborate.

But if have no idea how to start

There is a Free 12-days blogging bootcamp that teach you how to build a successful blog.
It teaches you how to write and make money while blogging. It help me and it can help you.

Bonus

How many tabs do you have open in your browser? If you are like me you only see the icons. I use Chrome and Opera. My favorite bookmark extension is Toby. It organizes your bookmarks in tabs and collections, and it closes the open tabs while you organize. Just visit www.gettoby.com

Pin for later

Hope you like this post, if you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comment section. 🙂